Blood Orange – Harriet Tyce

Alison has it all. A doting husband, adorable daughter, and a career on the rise – she’s just been given her first murder case to defend. But all is never as it seems . . . Just one more night. Then I’ll end it. Alison drinks too much. She’s neglecting her family. And she’s having an affair with a colleague whose taste for pushing boundaries may be more than she can handle. I did it. I killed him. I should be locked up. Alison’s client doesn’t deny that she stabbed her husband – she wants to plead guilty. And yet something about her story is deeply amiss. Saving this woman may be the first step to Alison saving herself. I’m watching you. I know what you’re doing. But someone knows Alison’s secrets. Someone who wants to make her pay for what she’s done, and who won’t stop until she’s lost everything . . .

Blood Orange is one of those books which, if your social media is anything like mine, has been EVERYWHERE for what seems like months. On the face of it we’ve got a psychological thriller – a woman is found by the body of her dead husband, covered in his blood and refusing to deny that she’s guilty.

But dig a little deeper and you’ve got so much more. Something is amiss, and it’s up to Alison to get to the bottom of it. Except Alison has her own problems. She drinks too much and is having an affair with a colleague, leaving her family to fend for themselves.

There are a lot of unpleasant characters in Blood Orange, and at times it’s hard to feel sympathy for anyone other than Alison’s daughter. Her husband and her lover both run to extremes of hot and cold, at one moment ignoring her and the next playing the lovey-dovey partner that she so desperately craves.

Given the cast of unlikeables, Harriet Tyce pulls off a neat trick of making you care about these people, leaving you wanting to know more about their story and the why and why not of the goings-on. If anything, the murder almost takes second stage to the complex relationship dynamics at play, and the case forms more of a textured background to the love triangle. There are, as you might expect, a number of twists along the way and whilst I guessed at one of the main ones fairly early on, I was hooked until the very end.

Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce is published by Wildfire on 21st February 2019. Many thanks to Wildfire and Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the blog tour, and for the advance copy of the book for review.

Harriet Tyce grew up in Edinburgh and studied English at Oxford University before doing a law conversion course at City University. She practised as a criminal barrister in London for nearly a decade. She is currently doing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.